Thank You Thursday: Finding Good

Last year when I was in Italy I had the delight in meeting a beautiful soul who called herself Mary. A few years earlier, when the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting happened, Mary was particularly upset by it and her Mum reminded her to focus on the good in the world. So her and a friend set up a Facebook page to help share acts of kindness.

Mary and her Mum, Pat.

One thing I most noticed about this bubbly young woman when I met her was how she exuded happiness like she didn’t know that sadness existed. Except she did. Mary lost her Mum, Pat, to cancer four years ago. In fact, it was four years ago, yesterday.

Despite the darkness that followed when the most important person in her life ‘had disappeared’, Mary found solace in reading the stories about kindness on the Facebook page.

“These stories were a constant reminder that there was still good in the world despite how badly I felt.” Mary said. It was then that her idea starting brewing for her current project, More Good.
This project sees Mary on a road trip to every state in the US to collect stories of human kindness and prove that there is, in fact, more good in the world. She intends to make a coffee table book of all these heart-warming stories and donate them to hospitals around the country, so people in the waiting rooms had a small glimmer of hope to focus on.

“In a world overrun with negative news, I wanted to create one more outlet to remind us that there is, in fact, more good.”

Mary is doing all this in her mother’s Subaru and pays for fuel for both herself and the car with donations that she is raising along the way on her GoFundMe page. And, to add to her kindness-seeking, she is relying on couch-surfing and the generosity of locals for accommodation over her year-long journey.

On the road to find hope

Through her profession as a photographer she captured beauty through a lens. Now, through her More Good project, she is capturing beauty through stories of kindness.

So this Thank You Thursday, we wanted to share Mary’s story and say thank you to her for embarking on such an inspiring journey with her More Good project. We are sure your Mum would be immensely proud of you, Mary, for the joy you are bringing to so many people.